Future conversations about short-term rentals are likely to occur in Lafayette after many council members agreed they wanted to hear how such properties could affect the city.

City council and the planning commission held a joint workshop Monday night to broadly discuss the positive and negative implications of short-term rentals on property owners, neighborhoods and the city with the goal of coming to a clear direction or to create next steps.

Council requested city staff to look into regulations for short-term rentals — rooms or units that are rented out for 30 days or less.

Currently, the city’s zoning does not allow short-term rentals, but there are an estimated 100, or more, such rentals within the city, according to a staff report.

Staff said there is no way to enforce the rental rules.

“Right now we’re not doing anything,” said Jana Easley, planning manager for Lafayette.

She added there is a way to enforce rental rules, but the city has no regulations for doing so.

The city does not allow short-term rentals because lodging uses are defined as those providing rooms for less than 30 days and lodging uses are allowed only in commercial zoning districts or by special use, according to the staff report.

Easley said there are five residential properties that have applied for the lodging permit and currently pay the lodging tax. There also are four commercial sites.

Lodging tax collected equates to $1,690 in revenue for each short-term rental, which would equate to $169,000 for 100 short-term rentals.

“We can’t operate on emotion on this,” said Doug Godfrey, planning commission chair, “we need to back up our decisions on good data. There’s probably a lot of good data out there and codes, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel on this.”

Anthony Viers, planning commissioner vice chair, said he was interested in what would benefit residents of Lafayette the most.

“I don’t know what benefits the community as a whole the most,” Viers said. “There’s a lot of numbers to look at.”

Councilmember Stephanie Walton said she was interested in how enforcing regulations would fit into a role of a city employee.

“There are companies to monitor (the rentals),” Easley said. “The fee (from the rentals) could pay for the monitoring, which could help with enforcing it. It would need to pay for itself.”

The consensus was to move forward with conversations and see ideas from city staff. There was an agreement there will need to be public input and research before anything is put into place.